#thirtyone

Day 122

[Transcript begin]

>> Should I be worried about your track record of deviance, 14?

“Sheesh, that’s harsh. No, I just wanted alone time—I had some candy and hung out, but like… I guess the REACT units need the day off more than I do. I pretty much do nothing nowadays.”

>> Working on the radio signal is certainly not nothing. And you messaged me earlier that you’ve made progress.

“I mean, you have decoding software on you, don’t you?”

>> I do. However, I decode using brute force, by randomly putting in possible letters in possible combinations and continually recalculating them until something coherent emerges. This requires quite a lot of electricity at the current level of nebulous understanding that we have.

“Yeah, that… sounds like a lot.”

>> There’s possibly more combinations than atoms in this room right now.

“Crazy.”

>> Combinatorics often is.

“Anyways, do you wanna see what I got?”

>> It would be a delight.

“Alright, let me play it out loud:”

>>...

>>...

>>....

“We should bring it up to 22 and 1. It’s from the coast and I mean… they seem to be doing good? Like pretty good? Should we try to contact them back?”

>> We have the coordinates for all of the coast’s radio towers, but it would take a moment to decode which tower is sending the signal. I will assign AUG-REACT-30 to the decoding process as you work on further clearing the signal.

“Can we just send stuff to all of them? Too much electricity?”

>> Yes. We could narrow it down to a few possibilities if you would like, possibly 3 to 5. 

“Okay. Okay - we can figure it out.”

>> Excellent work, 14. I’ll be on my way.

“Thanks!” [End of Transmission]